Google has never really cared about Linux. They use it when it suits them - on their servers (and they don't open most of the code) and on Android, because that is what the company that initially developed Android used and it suits them. Linux, for Google, is basically just a cheap way to get stuff done where they would otherwise have to spend lots of money and effort. They don't really care about the ideology behind it.
Proposing things to and supporting politicians with same views as you is not bribery. If they were bribing the police to bust you, then you would have a case. But it's not the same, and also, you are allowed to do the same.
I don't want socailism I want to be able to pay $5-$10 dollars a month to access all (most) music from any device without being locked into some moronic DRM scheme. It's not that hard.
That's too bad because in capitalism every person and company should be allowed to freely state their prices on services and products. What you want fits more into socialist system.
Shouldn't they be allowed to freely express their opinion like everyone else? Or is freedom of speech only allowed when it doesn't go against your own thinking?
Distribution is not the only thing media companies do. They also provide financing for new musicians (try to get loan from bank for your new band), marketing, experience in the markets and connections in the industry. The latter two are usually ignored by geeks who think they are not skills or necessary but in the real world they are.
Distribution is only small part of what they do. Do remember that every new musician or band is already free to go without record labels if they don't want these services. However, most of them do, voluntarily. I don't think we should be telling them that are not allowed to use services provided by record labels.
Can you tell me more about the amazing Microsoft SharePoint, which I can use in conjunction with fantastic business tools like Microsoft Great Plains to increase my productivity and my profitability?
I don't really know the details of Lumia 900, but WP7 actually is a great OS. Your blind hatred towards MS is just keeping you from admitting that. And yes, programming with Visual Studio and.NET is a blast. I've recently started using OS X and Objective-C and Xcode is nowhere close Microsoft's offerings for developers. And Linux is even further behind.
As much as Slashdot likes to generally think that it's some huge conspiracy, this is how people are. It's true for media companies, it's true for Microsoft, Apple and Google and it's true for Slashdotters and people in general too. Innovation is hard and everyone tries their best to protect what they have, even if they do the exact same elsewhere. The only solution would be some kind of state-run economy like Soviet Union had and what China has now.
You may think that nobody is using it, but it is actually quite widespread service. Of course, Microsoft also offers it for Office and other business users with actual SLA, unlike Google.
SkyDrive will also be directly integrated into Windows 8, which will most likely bring them millions of users. Hell, even Apple uses Microsoft's cloud offerings, albeit that is Microsoft Azure as they need programming access too.
Email definitely is storage. You don't want to keep deleting your emails all the time. You most likely also want to search through your old emails. With other free services of the time you would have to keep deleting them constantly as otherwise the message box got full and you didn't get new emails.
Since Google Music was just recently launched, why didn't they do it with Google Drive to begin with? Same is true for Picasa, or now Google+. Seems they are just separating their services. On top of that Google sucks at building brand names which is also visible from their use of subdomains for different products. drive.google.com looks a lot more serious than something like dropbox.com. They would probably have youtube under youtube.google.com if it wasn't for the fact that they bought the whole website from other company and it had already built it's name by then.
If you're worried about your privacy from the party offering the service, you can't give Dropbox a pass.
Like you noted, you use TrueCrypt or similar. This is even a suggested solution by Dropbox team and it's a valid one, because you should never trust third party provider with your encryption.
However, at least Dropbox does more encryption on the data and actually stores it in encrypted form, even if they are able to obtain the keys. This is still vastly better than just using HTTPS or other "secure" connection between the client and server but still saving it unencrypted. On top of that HTTPS etc are subject to secure key forgery and man in the middle attacks like providing self-signed key and snooping the connection (a real problem in many less developed countries).
Gmail was done remarkably better and offered much larger storage than their competitors. Yet, Gmail still didn't win Hotmail or Yahoo which to date are the two largest email providers on planet.
However, it doesn't seem like this is the case with Google Drive. It actually looks like they don't bring anything new or innovative to the table either, and in fact, might have a worse service than Dropbox and other companies have (not even having good software for OS X or Linux). They also don't offer that much more space either.
The cloud storage landscape and internet in 2012 is vastly different from email and Gmail when it launched.
There are two large, very real problems with Google Drive. For starters Google has a long history of abandoning projects after they fail to gain users on them. This would be a huge problem with cloud storage like Google Drive.
I also fail to see why this would get any good amount of users even if Google did advertise it correctly - unlike their search engine, gmail and youtube, cloud storage is nothing new. There are tons of companies offering their services with ridiculously low profit margins. Hell, most of them are free for home users, and I really wouldn't trust Google with my company or work data - I would use a professional hosting service with SLA and company that has no need to mine my data.
Lastly, but even more so importantly, putting everything for Google to datamine and crawl is just stupid. They already know so much - hell, they track Slashdot too. On top of that Google has serious problem with anti-competition regulators and this is just going to make those issues worse when Dropbox and other companies will demand Google to stop leveraging their search engine against them. They already have this problem in other markets.
Slashdot Mirror
Google has never really cared about Linux. They use it when it suits them - on their servers (and they don't open most of the code) and on Android, because that is what the company that initially developed Android used and it suits them. Linux, for Google, is basically just a cheap way to get stuff done where they would otherwise have to spend lots of money and effort. They don't really care about the ideology behind it.
Proposing things to and supporting politicians with same views as you is not bribery. If they were bribing the police to bust you, then you would have a case. But it's not the same, and also, you are allowed to do the same.
I don't want socailism I want to be able to pay $5-$10 dollars a month to access all (most) music from any device without being locked into some moronic DRM scheme. It's not that hard.
That's too bad because in capitalism every person and company should be allowed to freely state their prices on services and products. What you want fits more into socialist system.
Shouldn't they be allowed to freely express their opinion like everyone else? Or is freedom of speech only allowed when it doesn't go against your own thinking?
Distribution is not the only thing media companies do. They also provide financing for new musicians (try to get loan from bank for your new band), marketing, experience in the markets and connections in the industry. The latter two are usually ignored by geeks who think they are not skills or necessary but in the real world they are.
Distribution is only small part of what they do. Do remember that every new musician or band is already free to go without record labels if they don't want these services. However, most of them do, voluntarily. I don't think we should be telling them that are not allowed to use services provided by record labels.
Can you tell me more about the amazing Microsoft SharePoint, which I can use in conjunction with fantastic business tools like Microsoft Great Plains to increase my productivity and my profitability?
No, but you can Bing for that!
I don't really know the details of Lumia 900, but WP7 actually is a great OS. Your blind hatred towards MS is just keeping you from admitting that. And yes, programming with Visual Studio and .NET is a blast. I've recently started using OS X and Objective-C and Xcode is nowhere close Microsoft's offerings for developers. And Linux is even further behind.
As much as Slashdot likes to generally think that it's some huge conspiracy, this is how people are. It's true for media companies, it's true for Microsoft, Apple and Google and it's true for Slashdotters and people in general too. Innovation is hard and everyone tries their best to protect what they have, even if they do the exact same elsewhere. The only solution would be some kind of state-run economy like Soviet Union had and what China has now.
Images aren't usually sent with emails, they are loaded from a server.
You may think that nobody is using it, but it is actually quite widespread service. Of course, Microsoft also offers it for Office and other business users with actual SLA, unlike Google.
SkyDrive will also be directly integrated into Windows 8, which will most likely bring them millions of users. Hell, even Apple uses Microsoft's cloud offerings, albeit that is Microsoft Azure as they need programming access too.
In fact even Microsoft's offering, SkyDrive, is currently offering 25GB for free. Google is seriously lagging behind in this.
Email definitely is storage. You don't want to keep deleting your emails all the time. You most likely also want to search through your old emails. With other free services of the time you would have to keep deleting them constantly as otherwise the message box got full and you didn't get new emails.
Since Google Music was just recently launched, why didn't they do it with Google Drive to begin with? Same is true for Picasa, or now Google+. Seems they are just separating their services. On top of that Google sucks at building brand names which is also visible from their use of subdomains for different products. drive.google.com looks a lot more serious than something like dropbox.com. They would probably have youtube under youtube.google.com if it wasn't for the fact that they bought the whole website from other company and it had already built it's name by then.
If you're worried about your privacy from the party offering the service, you can't give Dropbox a pass.
Like you noted, you use TrueCrypt or similar. This is even a suggested solution by Dropbox team and it's a valid one, because you should never trust third party provider with your encryption.
However, at least Dropbox does more encryption on the data and actually stores it in encrypted form, even if they are able to obtain the keys. This is still vastly better than just using HTTPS or other "secure" connection between the client and server but still saving it unencrypted. On top of that HTTPS etc are subject to secure key forgery and man in the middle attacks like providing self-signed key and snooping the connection (a real problem in many less developed countries).
Gmail was done remarkably better and offered much larger storage than their competitors. Yet, Gmail still didn't win Hotmail or Yahoo which to date are the two largest email providers on planet.
However, it doesn't seem like this is the case with Google Drive. It actually looks like they don't bring anything new or innovative to the table either, and in fact, might have a worse service than Dropbox and other companies have (not even having good software for OS X or Linux). They also don't offer that much more space either.
The cloud storage landscape and internet in 2012 is vastly different from email and Gmail when it launched.
There are two large, very real problems with Google Drive. For starters Google has a long history of abandoning projects after they fail to gain users on them. This would be a huge problem with cloud storage like Google Drive.
I also fail to see why this would get any good amount of users even if Google did advertise it correctly - unlike their search engine, gmail and youtube, cloud storage is nothing new. There are tons of companies offering their services with ridiculously low profit margins. Hell, most of them are free for home users, and I really wouldn't trust Google with my company or work data - I would use a professional hosting service with SLA and company that has no need to mine my data.
Lastly, but even more so importantly, putting everything for Google to datamine and crawl is just stupid. They already know so much - hell, they track Slashdot too. On top of that Google has serious problem with anti-competition regulators and this is just going to make those issues worse when Dropbox and other companies will demand Google to stop leveraging their search engine against them. They already have this problem in other markets.